bell hooks: and Other Conversations by bell hooks

Author:bell hooks [hooks, bell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2023-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

TENDER HOOKS

INTERVIEW BY LISA JERVIS

BITCH MAGAZINE

WINTER 2000

Though bell hooks may be one of feminism’s sharpest thinkers and fiercest critics of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (a phrase that pops up often in her work), her favorite topic these days, in conversation and in writing, is love. Last winter’s All About Love explored romantic love, spiritual love, family love, and most of all profoundly politicized love. Next winter’s Salvation: Black People in Love will no doubt pick up where All About Love left off (and following that will come her second children’s book, Homemade Love). Not that the incredibly prolific hooks would stop there; she continues to add to her list of classic feminist texts at a brisk pace. One of her two books out this fall is Feminism Is for Everybody, a primer on feminism that, with chapter headings like “Liberating Marriage and Partnership” and “Total Bliss,” often reads more like a wish list of fertile feminist possibility. We caught up with her by phone to talk about self-help books, the penis, Nurse Betty—and, of course, the thoughts of love that have brought a different kind of passion to her work.

lisa jervis: In Feminism Is for Everybody, you write, “If women and men want to know love we have to yearn for feminism.” Can you talk about this connection between love and feminism?

bell hooks: I keep telling people that I’m going to be the high priestess of love for the next few years, and so many people keep saying, “Oh, well, bell hooks is turning soft ‘cause she’s focusing on love.” And I think, Oh, no, not the love I’m talking about—because I’m really talking about a love that’s grounded in a vision of mutuality and communion and sharing; to me that is so deeply related to feminism because I feel like as long as we have gender inequality and inequity and sexism and patriarchy, we can’t have mutuality. What we have is a constant paradigm of domination, a constant sense that in the world there’s always a top and bottom in our relationships, there’s always a subordinated person and a person who is dominant.

One thing that I have felt strongly over the years is that while I have seen relationships between heterosexual men and women change a lot, what I often see is that if the man assumes a more nurturing, more emotional and giving position, the woman is often cold and aloof and ungiving. We certainly see this in a lot of movies—even in a movie like High Fidelity, which I really enjoyed, we still see that you have a certain kind of warmth posited with the man and a coldness in the energy of the so-called New Woman, the young, professional career woman. It seems to me that this is still within the same old paradigm of every relationship [having] a submissive party and a dominant party. It’s just that people are more comfortable now with men taking on the submissive roles, but that’s not what feminist visions of true love are about, because those visions are about mutuality.

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